Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis was Lithuania’s leading composer at the turn of the 20th century as well as an internationally admired artist. The piano scores from which these pieces are transcribed are Romantic in expression, influenced by the beauty of his country’s landscape and its folklore. With this selection of works, Joana Daunytė has expanded the repertoire of Lithuanian harp works, presenting a new perspective on the music’s national flavor. Joana Daunytė is a distinguished harpist performing solo and chamber music. A prizewinner at several international competitions, she has performed in Europe, Russia and the US. She has been recognized for her achievements in music by Valdas Adamkus and Dalia Grybauskaitė, former presidents of Lithuania, and by the government of Lithuania.

Mosaic Voices are the Resident Choir at the New West End Synagogue, in London. The synagogue, designed in 1877 by the Scottish architect George Audsley, is a masterpiece of Victorian architecture, known for its beautiful choral acoustic. A great deal of the material on this album is therefore music sung by Mosaic Voices, in Hebrew, during religious services and festivals, of which this music forms a functional element. Ochila la’El, El Melech Yoshev, and Avinu Malkeinu are key musical works that form part of the New Year festival liturgy. Shomer Yisrael is sung during the little-known, but beautiful, midnight service of Selichot, which is part of the penitential prayers of the Hebrew month of Elul leading up to the New Year. Tree of Life, Generation to Generation, Yis’mechu, Ein Keloheinu, Uv’nucho Yomar, and Veh’al Kulam are pieces that the ensemble regularly sings at weekly Shabbat services, and form part of the liturgy for those services. The Musical Director, Michael Etherton, writes: ‘Exactly eighty years ago, my great grandmother Kamilla wrote a letter to her children. It was 1942. Fortunately, her children had escaped Nazi-occupied Austria, but Kamilla had not been so lucky. She endured four terrifying years of brutality and unimaginable suffering. The letter to her children was the last thing she wrote before being sent to Auschwitz, where she died. She did not know if her letter would ever reach her children. Eighty years later, my vocal ensemble, Mosaic Voices, is writing back to her in the form of an album of Jewish songs. We want Kamilla to know that, although she, her husband, and her sister, Minka, lost their lives in the Holocaust, all her children survived, and lived their lives successfully and happily in Britain, as proud Jewish people. Hitler’s mission failed. Her touching letter, which Kamilla wrote in German, has been set to music as one of the songs on this album (Letter from Kamilla). The other tracks that we have chosen to record celebrate the diversity, mysticism, and beauty of the music that Jewish people have brought to the world over time.’

During the Biedermeier period, the piano gained huge popularity as a domestic instrument, and piano concertos were increasingly arranged for chamber music ensembles. Ignaz Lachner’s superb arrangements of Mozart’s piano concertos are well known, but his brother Vinzenz Lachner’s arrangements of Beethoven’s concertos are a rarity, though equally as valuable. This volume completes the cycle of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos in Vinzenz Lachner’s transcriptions for piano and string quintet.

Rocking Horse Road is the debut recording of Jacqui Dankworth and the Brodsky quartet, bearing witness to a musical relationship that stretches back almost two decades. Jacqui Dankworth is one of the most highly regarded and celebrated vocalists in the UK. The Sunday Times called her ‘One of our finest singers, regardless of category’, whilst the Guardian noted she ‘exhibits a subtle control of dynamics and a voluptuous tonal richness that seems to make almost any material sound special’. Formed in 1972, the Brodsky Quartet have given more than 3,000 concerts around the world, and recorded over 70 albums, covering both the core classical repertoire and collaborations with a wide range of artists from all walks of musical life. The album covers a wide range of material that this partnership has gathered and honed over the years: compositions by Harvey Brough, David Gordon, Charlie Wood and Jacqui Dankworth herself sit alongside arrangements of songs by Björk, Sting, Diana Krall and Elvis Costello.

Star violinist David Garrett celebrates his ten-year spectacular crossover program with thousands of fans in the extraordinary atmosphere of the Arena di Verona, Italy. Performing his Greatest Hits of brilliant interpretations of rock classics like “We Are The Champions” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and world-famous pop songs like “Viva La Vida” or “Hey Jude” and his arrangements of classical melodies like Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, David Garrett left a thrilled audience in the Arena. Praised for pioneering the modern crossover trend as well as his exceptionally virtuous playing, David Garrett is equally at home at performing the most intricate classical compositions with the world’s leading conductors and orchestras as well as the most crowd-pleasing stadium rock hits. He combines rock star charisma with the kind of virtuosity innate only to the best instrumentalists of our time. Admired by all of his fans around the world, David Garrett has sold millions of tickets so far and earned 25 gold and 17 platinum awards in places as diverse as Hong Kong, Germany, Mexico, Taiwan, Brazil, Singapore, and many others.

Arthur Sullivan is best remembered today for his Savoy Operas with W.S. Gilbert, but during his lifetime Sullivan was also famed for his church, concert hall and stage works. These three sets of incidental music show his versatility in the genre. The music for The Merry Wives of Windsor has a joviality and lightness that matches it's pantomime mood, while the concert suite for MacBeth weaves together nervous tension and impending tragedy. By contrast, King Arthur required one of Sullivan's specialties, a sequence of choruses, edited after his death into this evocative suite.

A native of Rome, Muzio Clementi was ‘discovered’ by the wealthy Beckford family of Dorset in England, where the foundations for a distinguished international professional career as a composer and performer were laid. Clementi’s legacy to pianists was a significant one, introducing new virtuosity and exploring the possibilities of a recently developed instrument in an ever-changing society. The Op.1sonatas reflect the style of Haydn in the early 1770s, while the Opp.10and 12sonatas convey Clementi’s own dexterity as a pianist, including displays of his signature rapid thirds in both hands.

REVIEW:

There is so much more to Clementi than his well loved Sonatinas. This programme shows the development of Clementi’s style from the earlier Op 1 Sonatas to the Op 10 &12, written 12 or more years later. An enjoyable collection of this early English piano repertoire.

-- Lark Reviews

With this surround-sound recording of Berlioz’s Requiem, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra tackle the infinite and the immeasurable.

All the grandiose, striking beauty of the Requiem’s large-scale ceremonial is encapsulated by first-class vocal and orchestral forces, fully utilising the spatial possibilities of Grieghallen in Bergen. The matching of space and sonority was one of Berlioz’s lasting obsessions, one experience in St Paul’s Cathedral in London throwing Berlioz into a delirium of emotion from which he took days to recover. His Grande Messe des morts, notorious for its requirement of four brass bands in addition to a large orchestra and chorus, taken here from live concerts, has often been seen as one of the most emotionally powerful works of its kind.

Setting a solemn and austere, even ascetic text, the music is not that of an orthodox believer but of a visionary, inspired by the dramatic implications of death and judgement.

Between 1860 and 1925, the immigrants who had settled in Argentina to seek their fortune contributed to the development of this music, giving life to forms of varied derivation such as the Cuban habanera, the milonga (a type of folk dance), the African candombe and Italian songs. More of these immigrants came originally from Italy than from any other country, and the first musicians were Italian, which explains the lyrical element in the tango: its aura of melancholy and yearning. Enea Leone and Roberto Bongianino retrace the various stages in the evolution of the tango on this album: the milonga (Milonga de mis amores, Corralera, La trampera), the tango itself (El Chocio, El Pollo Ricardo, Mi refugio, Silbando), and the vals (Pedacito de cielo, Flor de lino). Piazzolla is naturally well-represented by classics such as Histoire du Tango (originally written for guitar and flute), and others in new arrangements. There are also several solo pieces, as well as an Italian homage to the world of the Tango: two compositions that feature in well-loved Italian films, Il postino and the TV serial Il commissario Montalbano.

This series marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, which falls in 2024. It’s dedicated to Bruckner’s symphonies, most of them recorded in new transcriptions for organ by Hansjörg Albrecht. The 8th recording was made on the organ at Gewandhaus in Leipzig with the transcription of Bruckner’s 7th Symphony by Erwin Horn.

From 1950 and onwards, Allan Pettersson was mainly occupied with working on the monolithic symphonies for which he is best known. But before that, while still a student at the Conservatory in Stockholm and later a viola player in the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, he composed two sets of songs: Six Songs and Barfotasånger (Barefoot Songs). Of these two, the second would become especially important for the composer, who returned to it throughout his life, quoting various songs from it in his symphonies. In Barfotasånger he set his own poems, full of autobiographical detail and using a highly personal, archaic language. Several of the songs reflect his childhood, as the youngest of four children growing up in a poor working-class neighborhood in Stockholm. All but two of them are in a minor key, in an idiom which alludes to folk songs, hymns and popular songs. They are here brought to sometimes painful life by Peter Mattei, one of the great singer-actors of our time, supported by Bengt-Åke Lundin, with whom he first collaborated almost 30 years ago, on an album of songs by Wilhelm Stenhammar.

The most complete collection ever issued of the Dutch Minimalist master, including the famous Canto Ostinato but also many previously unreleased recordings, all made by a pianist with an international reputation in the field of Minimalism. ‘Given his music’s virtuoso demands, and its spirituality, it is tempting to call him the Franz Liszt of minimalism.’ This assessment of Simeon Ten Holt by an American reviewer points to Ten Holt’s originality, his industry and his influence over modern Minimalism in the generations after its 1960s birth in America.

As with Liszt in Weimar during the 1850s and 60s, many paths have led to and from Ten Holt’s music. It has long been recognised that with Canto Ostinato, his flexible sequence of 92 variations on a simple bass-line, Ten Holt built a masterpiece to stand alongside the likes of In C by Terry Riley, and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. However, this box-set shows how much more there is to Ten Holt.

The boy Simeon was introduced to the world of music by hearing his father play the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata one night, and from then on he was entranced by the possibilities of stretching time through patterns. Late in life, he remarked: ‘I am the time, and I have the time.’ This box traces his development as has never been possible before, from the early untitled Compositions, comparable to the Abstract Expressionist canvases of the time, through miniatures such as sets of Epigrams and Aphorisms, to the triumph of Canto Ostinato, and then far beyond, to the mystical cycles of Lemniscaat, Horizon and finally the renewed vigour of Eadem Sed Aliter (‘The Same but Different’), a late piece which, as the composer remarked, ‘takes away the limits of the concepts of ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’, ‘before’ and ‘after’.’

As he explains in a personal introduction, Jeroen van Veen first encountered the music of Ten Holt as a child, listening to the radio to (as he discovered much later) the premiere of Horizon: ‘the notes melted together to create such a rich tapestry of colour.’ He has since performed Canto Ostinato and the rest of Van Veen’s music many times and in many countries, and in 2001 he became the founder chair of the Simeon Ten Holt Foundation. His performances, as recognised by critics in publications worldwide, are beautifully recorded and bear the stamp of complete authority in this music.

It is primarily for his large-scale orchestral works that Sebastian Fagerlund (b.?1972) has attracted attention, but throughout his career he has also composed chamber music. In his production, orchestral and chamber music have a fruitful relationship in which a chamber work may contain the germ of ideas that then appear in a new form in an orchestral score. One example of this is Fuel – a set of six miniatures from 2010 – which grows out of the same basic material as Ignite, a work for large orchestra completed in the same year, although they differ greatly in scale and in character. Common to the two genres is also Fagerlund’s firm grasp of the capabilities of the instruments he is writing for. Some of Finland’s leading instrumentalists join forces on the present album, with French horn player Hervé Joulain making an appearance in Transient Light, which is dedicated to him. The six works were composed between 2007 and 2013 and are all for different constellations and of varying dimensions – from a brief duo in one movement (Scherzic) to a quartet in six (Verso l’interno). But there are also common features that recur throughout the program; for example machine-like textures against which material with longer lines is reflected, and influences from other genres such as traditional music from the Middle East or rock. These do not appear as direct stylistic loans, however, but rather as elements embedded in Fagerlund’s own music.

The heyday of English consort music coincides with the exciting change in style from musical Renaissance to early Baroque between 1580 and 1630. William Byrd and his successors played a decisive role in shaping it with sacred and secular songs, fantasies and dances. This production on the 400th anniversary of William Byrd's death shows how diverse and colourful the repertoire of consort music is. On the one hand, the English composers impress with sophisticated compositional art, on the other hand, they take up popular music of their time. The result is musical atmospheres that reflect the deep melancholy, pious confidence and plump joie de vivre of Shakespeare's time.

After its first album devoted to Schumann’s first two piano trios, the Kungsbacka Piano Trio now presents the conclusion of this series with the Piano Trio No. 3 in G minor, to which they add the Six Studies in Canonic Form, originally for pedal piano and performed here in an arrangement for piano trio, and an early work, the Quartet in C minor for violin, viola, cello and piano, which was only published in 1979. Composed in 1851, the third Piano Trio achieves the tonal balance Schumann was aiming for with an utmost independence of the three instruments while having ‘obsessive impulses’ running through it, to quote pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips. The Six Studies in Canonic Form that follow appear as small contrapuntal jewels that testify to Robert Schumann’s keen interest in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. Finally, the Quartet composed when Schumann was 18 reveals a wildly creative mind at work, inspired in turn by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin. Yet, despite these influences, one perceives a distinctive voice that reveals the obsessive qualities that would characterise Schumann’s later works. “A thrilling ride for performer and listener”, promises Crawford-Phillips.

REVIEW:

In Schumann’s Piano Trio 3 in G minor, the Kungsbacka Trio is precise and spry for the entire 26 minutes, and the sound quality is pristine. These musicians find an elegance in the composer that other artists sometimes miss.

The 6 Studies in Canonical Form appear here in their transcription for trio by Theodor Kirchner. The quality is high, but just a few might have sufficed.

The Piano Quartet in C minor is from 1829, making it one of Schumann’s very first attempts at composition. He never finished the piano parts, and so they are completed here by musicologist Joachim Draheim. The Minuet is especially lighthearted, with pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips leading the way. At 33 minutes, this piece is a bit long, with many mercurial shifts of mood and dynamics. Still, this is an impressive album, a happy meeting of performers and material.

-- American Record Guide